The Evolution of Crypto Mining

The Interview - Crypto ·
Featuring Jesse Phillips and Santiago Velez

Published on: February 10th, 2021 • Duration: 58 minutes

Jesse Phillips, business development manager at Binance Pool, joins Santiago Velez, co-founder and R&D division lead for Block Digital, to discuss Binance Pool and the changing dynamics in crypto mining. Phillips explains that mining takes computational power and applies that to verifying transactions on a public blockchain network for a reward. He points out the fact that the dynamic of mining has changed over the past few years as competition has grown, pushing many miners into mining pools, which aggregate computational power from many users to collaboratively mine and split rewards. Phillips dives into the market around application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs), stating that hardware for mining has its own cyclical markets as they are related but not strongly correlated to cryptocurrency speculation. Filmed on January 25, 2021.

Key Learnings: Application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs) mining hardware has its own market dynamics with separate factors than the cryptocurrencies they are mining. Mining pools are becoming increasingly important as mining becomes more competitive. Since solo miners get priced out, they need to join pools to have a chance at receiving any reward. Hardware and chip manufacturers are increasingly selling based on hash rate output and rewards rather than just hardware costs.